{"title":"Contemplative radicals","authors":"Ori Mautner","doi":"10.1111/amet.70116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.70116","url":null,"abstract":"Engaged Dharma Israel (EDI), a radical‐left group, combines Buddhist‐inspired contemplation with anti‐occupation activism in solidarity with Palestinians. For EDI, ethical self‐cultivation and political resistance are mutually sustaining commitments, yet their relationship demands ongoing, sometimes anxious work. Participants challenge both dharma practitioners who pursue self‐fashioning without political engagement and radical‐left activists who pursue political opposition without systematic ethical reflection, insisting each orientation is incomplete without the other. Nimrod, an everyday exemplar of EDI's approach, realizes its plural, sometimes conflicting values. Navigating risks of complicity, hostility, burnout, and physical harm, he demonstrates how participants work out the relationship between self‐cultivation and resistance, holding their respective values in productive tension and transforming them into embodied virtues. Tracing this navigation offers a generative response to a recurring anthropological question—how to analytically relate the ethical and the political—by ethnographically comparing the ways people connect, separate, or sequence them beyond any single theoretical configuration.","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Criminalizing hate speech in the Balkans","authors":"Jordan Kiper","doi":"10.1111/amet.70127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.70127","url":null,"abstract":"When does speech lose its legal protection and become criminally sanctionable because it causes violence? Among legal scholars, this is known as the “threshold problem,” and in international criminal law (ICL), the threshold is defined according to recent speech‐crime trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Yet, as borne out in ethnographic interview data, survivors and former combatants of the Yugoslav Wars disagree with ICL's approach to speech crimes. Judges in international tribunals deploy what I call <jats:italic>endgame analysis</jats:italic> , in which they consider the threshold of violent speech only at the inflection point when violence immediately and directly follows speech. In contrast, survivors and combatants assert that atrocity crimes resulted in part from the longer‐term <jats:italic>accumulation</jats:italic> of ethnic slurs and wartime misinformation enunciated by political and cultural authorities, both before and during the Yugoslav Wars. Challenging recent jurisprudence, they call for these former authorities to be held accountable for the violent, cumulative effect of their speech.","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Clawing back: Redistribution in precarious times By DeborahJames. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2025. 206 pp.","authors":"Federico Neiburg","doi":"10.1111/amet.70122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.70122","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"87 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149124457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Excited delirium: Race, police violence, and the invention of a disease By Aisha M.Beliso‐De Jesús. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024. 319 pp.","authors":"Breea C. Willingham","doi":"10.1111/amet.70125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.70125","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"195 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149124469","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}